The New Yorker Is Temporarily Making All Of Its Archives Free; Here Are 8 Sports Stories You Should Read

The New Yorker relaunched its website yesterday, signaling a shift in the magazine's new
focus on the internet. In honor of their revamped online
presence, the magazine has made their archive (from 2007 to
present, plus an assortment of older pieces) free to the public
for the remainder of the summer.

Today we've complied 8 of The New Yorker's best sports pieces. We
tried to pick both old pieces and contemporary ones, along with a
variety of topics spanning different sports. By no means is it an
exhaustive list, and feel free to add ones we missed in the
comments section.

If you're lamenting the slow time of the year in sports, these
pieces might help.

John Updike's profile on Ted Williams centers around
Williams' final at-bat in Fenway Park but covers the ballplayer's
life and relationship with his team and with the city of Boston.
"The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no
mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats,
mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of
shared memories," writes Updike.

Even the most diehard Yankees
fans can appreciate Updike's prose and eye for detail about
baseball. Here's Upike on Fenway:

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a
lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green
and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an
old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and
rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a
compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s
beguiling irregularities.

Levy profiles Caster Semenya, the South African runner who won
the 800 meter championship at the 2009 World Championships in
Berlin before questions were raised about her gender. The piece
examines important issues, like how we consider gender and
sexuality, and how these topics relate to sports and to South
African culture. Although extensive gender tests by the IAFF —
track and field's governing body — ultimately allowed Semenya to
keep her gold medal and compete in future races, including the
2012 London Olympics where Semenya took silver, she will forever
be shadowed by the 2009 gender scandal.

From Levy:

But, setting aside the issue of gender, there is still no
such thing as a level playing field in sports. Different bodies
have physical attributes, even abnormalities, that may provide a
distinct advantage in one sport or another. The N.B.A., for
instance, has had several players with acromegaly—the
overproduction of growth hormone. Michael Phelps, who has won
fourteen Olympic gold medals, has unusually long arms and is said
to have double-jointed elbows, knees, and ankles. Is Caster
Semenya’s alleged extra testosterone really so different?

Murakami's memoir about his relationship between running and
writing fiction is captivating, even if you don't fancy yourself
much of a novelist or long-distance runner. Like many great
pieces of sportswriting, Murakami's is about much more than
actual sports — it precisely details fears and anxieties as
universal as marriage, career choices, and quitting smoking.
Murakami's also a big baseball fan, and his retelling of a game
between the Yakult Swallows and Hiroshima Carp is
excellent.

Here's Murakami on running:

That’s why I’ve never recommended running to others. If
someone has an interest in long-distance running, he’ll start
running on his own. If he’s not interested in it, no amount of
persuasion will make any difference. Marathon running is not a
sport for everyone, just as being a novelist isn’t a job for
everyone. Nobody ever recommended or even suggested that I be a
novelist—in fact, some tried to stop me. I simply had the idea to
be one, and that’s what I did. People become runners because
they’re meant to.

Mead's profile on Shaquille O'Neal, at the time the center
for the Los Angeles Lakers, brilliantly describes the outrageous
life of Shaq both on and off the court. At one point, she
describes how O'Neal envisions his future mausoleum, covered with
Superman logos, TVs showing his basketball highlights, all with
stadium-style seating. The piece is high-quality entertainment
because, well, so is Shaq. Here's Mead on Shaq and home
improvement:

Fortunately, if O’Neal is recovering from surgery he will
have the solace of various home improvements that are under way
in Orlando, where his house measures thirty-six thousand square
feet, and faces four hundred yards of waterfront. He has already
added an eight-thousand-square-foot gym and a regulation-size
basketball court, and contractors have started on the other side
of the house, adding a new swimming pool and another nine
thousand square feet of living space, including seven new
bedrooms (O’Neal already has a master bedroom with a circular bed
measuring twenty feet across), a recreation room, a cigar room, a
movie theatre, and a private dance club with a state-of-the-art
d.j. booth.

Liebling is one of the great 20th century sportswriters, best
known for his pieces in The New Yorker on boxing. "Ahab and
Nemesis" details Rocky Marciano versus Archie Moore at Yankee
Stadium, one of the premier fights in America's golden age of
boxing. It's a fight of intellect versus force — Moore, the
crafty fighter, trading blows with Marciano, the hard-hitting
champion of the world. As he watches the fight, Liebling
references everything from Moby Dick to Don Giovanni to Winston
Churchill, and the combination of high- and low-brow allusions
mixed with brilliant boxing details make Liebling himself as much
of a character in the piece as any fighter.

Here's Liebling describing Marciano entering the ring:

At about ten-thirty, the champion and his faction entered the
ring. It is not customary for the champion to come in first, but
Marciano has never been a stickler for protocol. He is a humble,
kindly fellow, who even now will approach an acquaintance on the
street and say bashfully, “Remember me? I’m Rocky Marciano.” The
champion doesn’t mind waiting five or ten minutes to give anybody
a punch in the nose.

Collins' profile on Novak Djokovic spans his rise from humble
beginnings in Serbia to the third best player in world tennis but
perennially overshadowed by the historic rivalry between Federer
and Nadal. At the time of the article, Djokovic had just begun to
emerge from these shadows, but Collins wonders if he'll ever act
like a champion in the way both Nadal and Federer have. Over the
course of the piece Collins dazzles with her details on Djokovic,
whose as polarizing as he is dominant:

He bounces the ball a million
times before he serves. His play is plasmatic. He seems to flow
toward the corners of the court. He is an origami man, folding at
the waist to dig up a drop shot, starfishing for a high forehand
return, cocking his leg behind his head in an arabesque as he
blasts a backhand down the line. He lunges, he dives, he beats
his pecs. He once yelled—in Serbian—“Now you all will suck my
dick!”

Owens dives deeply into the malady that plagues many athletes
(not just golfers), known as the yips. He begins the piece
describing the peculiar golf swing of Hank Haney, the golf coach
of Tiger Woods who also happens to have the yips: "He drew
his driver back high in the air while turning to look at the
clubhead, took a baseball-like practice swing well above the
ball—then, immediately, took the club all the way back again and
swung," Owen talks to sports psychologists, neurologists, and
yip-infected professional athletes in every sport from baseball
to cricket to archery. It's a fascinating read:

Yipping also is usually extremely task-specific. Haney
never stopped being a good putter. Knoblauch didn’t have a
problem throwing from the outfield. Archers who can no longer hit
a bull’s-eye often have no trouble shooting at bare bales of
straw. If the yips and other sports-related movement problems are
solely a matter of anxiety, why do they affect only certain
motions? And how can a change of target, technique, or equipment
sometimes make them go away?

Perhaps the most interesting part of Specter's 2002 profile
on Lance Armstrong is reading it today with knowledge of how the
entire Armstrong fiasco played out. At the time of the piece's
publication, Armstrong is at the apex of his career and fame,
having recovered from cancer and won multiple Tour de Frances
with his Postal Service team. Specter's love of Lance resonates
throughout the piece, and it's hard to not shake your head when
reading about performance-enhancing drugs and the random dug
tests Armstong was subject to. But there's also great writing
about cycling, and it's fascinating to remember a time when
Armstrong was among the most beloved athlete in sports:

In Austin, Lance (other than Dubya, he is the only one-name
Texan) has a more devoted following than Bush, Lyle Lovett, and
the Texas Longhorns football team combined. One night during my
weekend in Austin, I drove over to Chuy’s, an informal Tex-Mex
place that is one of Armstrong’s favorite local restaurants. (It
was famous locally even before a hardworking bartender carded
President Bush’s nineteen-year-old daughter Jenna.) Armstrong has
a weakness for Chuy’s burritos.